The highest percentage of people (24%) said “opportunity to become who you want to be.” My Christian faith antennae rose up immediately, as if to say, “Really, are you sure about that?” Freedom of religion recorded 20% while Christian origins and values came in at 11%. We could spend hours trying to evaluate exactly what these findings reveal, but I’d rather spend my time looking at what Scripture reveals about who we are.

In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, narrative about creation, says:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:26-27).

You may be saying, “Well, that’s kind of vague. It doesn’t really say much about who we really are.” However, it says a lot more than meets the eye.

Imagine that the tiny clump of a fertilized egg, after nine months of protection and incubation in its mother’s womb, would become Albert Einstein, Pascal, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Billy Graham, or Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, or Dorothy Vaughn (the women who worked at NASA but remained hidden from the public until just recently). Can any human imagine such a thing?

Here’s another mind-blowing fact that’s found in Proverbs:

“The Lord possessed me (WISDOM) at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. From everlasting I was established, From the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth” .… “Then I [WISDOM] was the craftsman at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in his presence,” (Proverbs 8 22-23, 30 emphasis added).

God’s attributes include “wisdom,” and the indwelling of his attributes accompanied him at the time of creation. Their presence in him weren’t added to him later—they aren’t a “collection.” To understand how this works, we must first remember that God is a unity—a consolidation of who he is as a person.

However, in this passage we see God’s wisdom differently, because in the context of the Proverbs passage, wisdom was the artisan (the craftsman) by his side during creation. Meaning that wisdom is preferentially superior.

So, here’s my question:

In terms of our inception, birth, origin, or genesis—why would we want to be anything different from what we are?